Mobile digital terminals, such as mobile telephones and the like are becoming increasing commonplace throughout the world. Recent technological advances in processing and storage capacity have made it possible for such terminals to become multi-functional. For example, no longer is the mobile telephone limited to telephonic voice communication but may also provide other means of digital communication, such as digital networking (i.e., Internet communication, text messaging, and the like), image or video capture means, digital video broadcast reception and the like.
As the communication means and the functionality of such terminals expands, such terminals will readily come in contact with an increasingly voluminous amount of media items, such as email, voice mail, digital image files, digital video files and the like. As the memory capacity of theses terminals increases, either via internal memory capacity or the ability to readily access external memory storage elements, the user of the device will have the capability to store and/or access all of these media items.
The increasing amount of media items stored or available to the digital device has been the impetus behind implementation of file storage and organization applications and more specifically, calendar-type applications that allow the user to categorize media items according to the date and/or time associated with the media item. For example, the Microsoft Outlook application, available form the Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., provides for storage and categorization of email, voicemail and the like according to the date of receipt or the date of transmission. Other applications have been developed that are more suitable to mobile terminals and provide for the user to efficiently locate a media item according to the time associated with the media item. For example, if the media item is an image file captured by a mobile terminal (i.e., a photograph taken by a camera equipped mobile telephone) the calendar application will typically associate the image file with the date and time at which the image file was created or an event associated with the image file (e.g., a birthday party, a meeting, a family event, etc). Thus, the calendar-applications allow the user to store media files, such as email, short message service (SMS) messages, voicemail, image files, video files and the like in diary format to allow the user ready and efficient access to the media items. However, currently, extensive use of such mobile terminal calendar-type applications has not been realized by the device consumer.
Recent innovations have made it possible for the mobile terminal to provide context-awareness functionality, such as location of the device, environment of the device's location, movement of the device and the like. Such functionality is provided by including corresponding sensors in the device or providing for the terminal to communicate with external resources that provide context information. For example, the mobile terminal may be equipped with a Global Positioning Sensor (GPS) that provides the present location of the mobile device, a temperature sensor, an altitude sensor, motion or acceleration sensors and the like. External resources may be any external device capable of providing contextual information, such as access points, network nodes, other mobile communication devices and the like.
Context-awareness is a key area of potential for mobile devices because it enables differentiation from stationary devices, like desktop computers, because mobile use is characterized by constant change in context (i.e., the device moves constantly and encounters constantly changing environments). Moreover context-awareness enables an overall richer user-experience. It provides the user with valuable information related to the context of the device.
In a typical context-awareness application the mobile terminal will be capable of providing current contextual information. For example, an application may implemented whereby the device is capable of providing the user through a user interface, such as a display, the current location of the device, the temperature, altitude, barometric pressure or the like of the device's current location.
Contextual information is also captured, continuously or at a given time interval and provided to certain types of applications that utilize contextual information accumulated over time. For instance, in order to provide contextually sensitive set of bookmarks according to the location, the application may need to record the browsing behaviors in relation to the device location over time. However, the applications that customize the behavior, i.e., context and the content set according to recognized usage patterns do need to display the raw context data to the user. As such, the users are not aware that the context information is being captured and no further utilization of the context data by the user is provided for.
Therefore a need exists to provide a user access to captured context data and, more specifically, access to the captured context data in relation to a period or moment in time. Such an application will provide the user of the mobile terminal ready and efficient access to captured context data. This type of data will provide the user with a diary as to where the device (and thus the user) was located at a previous point in time and other previous data related to the context of the terminal. An additional need exists to provide the user with various access modes to the context data such that the data can benefit from the data and use the data in other applications.